Author: Neil Thomas | Page 3 | Science and Culture Today

^{Type
post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
June 13, 2024

Categories
Evolution
Intelligent Design
Tagged
, Charles Bradlaugh, Charles Darwin, childhood, Enlightenment, Erasmus Darwin, evolutionary psychology, Greek gods, HMS Beagle, Janet Browne, Martin Luther, Misia Landau, Robert Chambers, Samuel Haughton, Stephen Jay Gould, telos, Thomas Huxley, William Wordsworth}

Darwin’s Science and Storytelling

_{Neil Thomas
June 13, 2024

Evolution, Intelligent Design

17}

His five-year voyage was undoubtedly an eye-opening rite of passage but perhaps not as foundational to his intellectual development as is sometimes proposed. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
June 10, 2024

Categories
Evolution
Faith & Science
Tagged
, abiogenesis, Bible, Charles Darwin, complexification, Darwinism, Epicurus, Higher Criticism, Lawrence Krauss, Mircea Eliade, Old Testament, Plato, Richard Dawkins, Stonehenge, Victorian England}

Why Has Darwin Been Believed?

_{Neil Thomas
June 10, 2024

Evolution, Faith & Science

17}

By the later 1830s educated people in England and far beyond its borders had experienced some truly convulsive existential tremors beneath their feet. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
April 18, 2024

Categories
Bioethics
Faith & Science
Tagged
, ancient Greece, Charles Darwin, Christianity, Enlightenment, Erasmus Darwin, Euripides, gods, Judeo-Christian tradition, mythology, New Testament, Old Testament, secularism, theodicy}

Poet and Scientist, Goethe Offered an Enlightenment Theodicy

_{Neil Thomas
April 18, 2024

Bioethics, Faith & Science

13}

Like Erasmus Darwin, Goethe was both poet and scientist and had himself at one time speculated on ideas of evolution. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
March 13, 2024

Categories
Evolution
Faith & Science
Tagged
, Asia, atheism, Charles Lyell, Christianity, Daniel Dennett, Enlightenment, Erasmus Darwin, First Cause, fundamentalism, Garden of Eden, God Hypothesis, Higher Criticism, Lamarckian theory, Louis Agassiz, On the Origin of Species, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Dawkins, Richard Swinburne, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Uncertainty Principle, Victorian England, William James, William Lane Craig}

Shelley, Darwin, and the 19th-Century God Debate

_{Neil Thomas
March 13, 2024

Evolution, Faith & Science

19}

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley threw down the gauntlet for what was effectively to become the great Victorian dispute about religious faith. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
February 19, 2024

Categories
Evolution
Faith & Science
Tagged
, agnostics, biologists, cosmologists, creationists, Darwin’s Bluff, evidence, evolution, evolutionary mechanisms, linguists, Luther College, nature, religion, Robert Shedinger, scientific evidence, The Mystery of Evolutionary Mechanisms}

In Darwin’s Bluff, Robert Shedinger Rightly Forgoes the Hagiographic Tradition

_{Neil Thomas
February 19, 2024

Evolution, Faith & Science

1}

The present reader, in company with a host of agnostic biologists and cosmologists, simply finds in Darwin a complete dearth of convincing scientific evidence. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
February 12, 2024

Categories
Biology
Chemistry
Evolution
Faith & Science
Tagged
, A. N. Wilson, abiogenesis, apologetics, Arthur Eddington, atheism, Big Bang, Charles Bradlaugh, Daniel Dennett, Darwinism, Erasmus Darwin, evolution, Goldilocks Zone, Karl Popper, Lucretius, natural preservation, natural selection, New Atheists, randomness, Richard Dawkins, spontaneous generation, teleology, The Descent of Man, The Selfish Gene, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Malthus, Werner Heisenberg}

Richard Dawkins and the Law of Unintended Consequences

_{Neil Thomas
February 12, 2024

Biology, Chemistry, Evolution, Faith & Science

20}

The New Atheists’ failure to understand the nuanced way that “ordinary people” think was a profound strategic error. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
January 5, 2024

Categories
Ethics
Evolution
Faith & Science
History of Science
Intelligent Design
Tagged
, Adam and Eve, agency, atheism, Charles Bradlaugh, Cicero, deduction, Enlightenment, evolution, fact, Garden of Eden, induction, intellectual history, intelligent design, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gribbin, Julian Huxley, metaphysics, Nancy Pearcey, natural selection, Old Testament, On the Origin of Species, Paul Davies, progress, Richard Dawkins, Roman Catholic, teleology, theology, Thomas Huxley, Tom Wolfe, Uncertainty Principle, vera causa, Victorian England, watchmaker, Werner Heisenberg, William Blake}

Darwinism as Fact? The Waning of an Historical Myth

_{Neil Thomas
January 5, 2024

Ethics, Evolution, Faith & Science, History of Science, Intelligent Design

20}

Historically the unfathomable subtleties of our terrestrial environment have been viewed as in and of themselves empirical markers for design. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
June 19, 2023

Categories
Evolution
Faith & Science
Intelligent Design
Tagged
, bacteria, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, creation, Darwinian theory, Darwinism, Denis Diderot, Enlightenment, Erasmus Darwin, Erwin Schrödinger, giraffes, Homo sapiens, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Lamarckian theory, micromutations, natural preservation, natural selection, nature, Nick Lane, On the Origin of Species, quantum physics, Stanford University, teleology, theology, Thomas Huxley, University of Chicago Press, William Paley, William Shakespeare}

Darwinian Natural Selection: A Covert Theology of Nature?

_{Neil Thomas
June 19, 2023

Evolution, Faith & Science, Intelligent Design

18}

Those who interpreted the essence of Darwinism as being an explanation of evolution in (covertly) theistic terms appear to have had a point. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
March 7, 2023

Categories
Evolution
Intelligent Design
Tagged
, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Denis Diderot, Erasmus Darwin, evolution, history, Howard Glicksman, intelligent design, Jerry Fodor, Julien Offray de la Mettrie, L’Homme Machine, Lamarckism, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, metaphors, Mother Nature, natural causes, natural selection, nature, On the Origin of Species, philosophes, Steve Laufmann, Thomas Malthus, transmutation, Victorians, world spirit}

Natural Selection: The Evolution of a Mirage

_{Neil Thomas
March 7, 2023

Evolution, Intelligent Design

19}

Natural selection reveals itself as not just a metaphor but a mixed one: Nature being dumb but nevertheless capable of discrimination. Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Neil Thomas

Date
February 1, 2023

Categories
Evolution
Geology
Intelligent Design
Science
Tagged
, Anthropic Principle, argument from analogy, Carl Sagan, category error, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Copernican principle, evolution, Frank Drake, Georges Cuvier, Goldilocks Zone, HMS Beagle, James Hutton, Louis Agassiz, Mendelian genetics, Natural Theology (book), On the Origin of Species, Principles of Geology, Robert Shedinger, Royal Society, Scotland, South America, uniformitarianism, William Paley}

Darwin’s Category Errors and Their Consequences

_{Neil Thomas
February 1, 2023

Evolution, Geology, Intelligent Design, Science

15}

Charles Darwin indiscriminately lumped together the organic and inorganic spheres — a grand category error. Read More ›